Landscape Architect Knots Together Macrame Workshops

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

What's up, my friends? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. For those listening in real time, today is my sister's birthday. Just wanna say a shout out to her, Mary Guillipo.

You are the best, even though you keep beating me in ping pong. But I'm gonna practice, I will get better. And listeners, regardless of when you happen to be listening to the show, we're gonna talk today about starting a workshop. I did about 10 Side Hustle School workshops in our first year. At the end, I'll include a few of my lessons learned from that experience.

But first in today's story, to start with her, a woman's passion for macrame turns into a money-making hustle teaching others the craft. Now, by the way, if you do not know what macrame is, let me just confess something here. You're not the only one. When I read the notes to this story, I was like, hmm, I'm not actually certain that I know this word. And then I read more about it and I was like, oh, I think I know what that is.

I just didn't know the word, right? It's not actually the wrapper. I was like, macrame the wrapper who did thrift shop. No, different guy. We're gonna get into it in the episode, but in short, we can say that the person we're featuring today literally gets paid to tie knots together.

In addition to selling her art at farmer's markets, she now teaches several workshops a month. So coming up, we've got an origin story. How did this come to be? A way to attract students in a workshop, perhaps when you don't have a big audience of your own, 'cause that's what she did, and also a lesson in pricing. So all kinds of stuff today.

Stay tuned, don't go anywhere. Here is a shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Marie Fryer is a full-time landscape architect at a design firm located in Charleston, South Carolina. She loves what she does, but she's also learned the importance of diversifying her income. Upon graduating from college a decade ago, the economy took a nosedive.

Thankfully, she survived the round of layoffs at her firm, but she was hit with a substantial salary cut. In order to make ends meet, she worked 40 hours a week at her firm and picked up an additional 25 hours a week as a sales associate at the popular home decor shop, Pier 1. It definitely wasn't the most ideal time to break into the job market, but those early years in her career taught her a valuable lesson. If you live within your means and work hard, you can survive anything. So fast forward to 2017, a decade later, Marie was perusing a West Elm catalog, which is another home decor shop.

You might be sensing a theme here. And it saw a wall hanging for sale for $400. Wall hanging for sale, $400. That was outside her price range and not by just a bit. But with the rise in Pinterest and DIY techniques, Marie figured she just might be able to make it herself.

So that night she got on YouTube and started teaching herself some macrame basics. All right, so what is macrame for anybody out there who doesn't know like myself? It is the art of knotting cord or string into patterns to make decorative articles. Like for example, a plant hanger. And as soon as I saw a picture of it, I was like, oh, I know what that is.

No, I just didn't know the word. I'll always be honest with you. At first, her fascination for the craft served as a way to harness creative energy and make items out of budget. But once she realized how simple and creative this macrame could be, she began noticing that fiber art was becoming a huge trend. The term boho chic was even being tossed around.

Marie figured that if West Elm could sell a basic wall hanging for $400, there had to be a market for a local fiber artist in Charleston, a city that boasted a supportive, thriving artistic community. She dove head first into learning anything she could about how to turn her hobby into a side business. She even listened to side hustle school. What's up, always glad to hear that. Thanks so much, Marie.

Glad it was helpful. She began by making plant hangers and wall hangings in the early hours of the morning and then developed her brand and website on the weekends. She even bartered with friends who had creative hobbies for help with things like photography in order to keep her startup costs low. Those costs were just $350. The business was called Macramade by Marie.

Love that. And now she just needed a place to sell her wares. She made a list of all the farmer's markets in her area and applied. She first filled in as an alternate for regular vendors before securing a spot of her own. After she made five sales on her first day, she was able to afford a new spool of rope to create inventory for the following week.

She also started taking requests for large hangings for boutique displays and began designing wedding backdrops for good measure. Marie described her first year of running Macramade as putting all of her earnings into upgrading her display and making her business and art better. In her second year though, her business model took a turn. Out of all the questions she received from customers, do you teach classes was the one she heard the most. That wasn't a plan she originally had in mind, but with continued request, she noticed that there was definitely a desire for it.

So Marie decided to give teaching Macramade a knot. Actually it's a shot, but it just sounded better to say a knot. She reached out to a local business to see if they would let her host a class to get a feel for it. And Marie fell in love with teaching the same way Ryan Gosling fell in love with Rachel McAdams in the notebook. She loved it from her very first class.

In fact, she loved it so much, she decided to revise her business model from creating products mostly to teaching more classes. Teaching the workshops took less time and was overall more fun and profitable than selling at the markets. Now at that first workshop, Marie partnered with a local shop that had a large Instagram following. Since she was just starting out, she didn't have much of a social media presence. And her main goal at the time was to raise awareness for her classes.

But from there, she went from strength to strength, or at least workshop to workshop. And she began hosting more and more classes. Here's some lessons from her. She believes there needs to be synergy between the host business and the workshops. Spotting the right partner is therefore crucial.

The key is to make that workshop mutually beneficial for both parties. One week she might teach a class at a plant store, and the following week at a vintage arts and crafts shop. She's also a firm believer in attracting customers through multiple means, or in her words, not putting all of your advertising eggs in one basket. She splits up her marketing efforts four different ways. Number one, paid advertising on both Instagram and Facebook.

Number two, Eventbrite, where her customers purchase tickets online. Number three, her website, macramadebymarie.com. And number four, word of mouth. She's had lots of repeat attendees who often encourage new people to come. Now as a side note, we've got a specific episode coming up in a few days.

It's actually all about word of mouth marketing. So I'm gonna talk about that in some more detail. The workshops hold between 12 and 20 people and last for two hours. Marie profits between about $300 to $550 per workshop. She holds several of them per month.

She plans to continue teaching workshops with local businesses, as well as taking on more custom orders. Her macramade profits are going in a savings fund with some of that money reserved for fun trips with her husband. [Music]

So we could do a whole extended episode all about workshops that maybe we will at some point. I just wanna give you a couple of quick lessons that I learned myself from doing that workshop series, maybe a year or two ago. Did about 10 workshops across the country.

So something I was surprised at is that people are willing to sign up far in advance, which is not me at all. Like I don't sign up for anything in advance, but a lot of people do. And so if you have an idea of doing a number of workshops, you should publish them all. I said, you can publish a workshop for six months from now. And if people are going to sign up at some point, some of them will actually sign up super early.

So that was interesting for me to see. Number two, raise the price towards the end. Now, like as the workshop itself approaches, if you're still taking registrations, make sure it costs more to register at the last minute. I actually experienced this myself last month. I was doing a race, like a half marathon, and I didn't sign up until the day before.

And so I had to pay $20 more. Now technically that's my fault. So I wasn't upset about it. And I also thought, well, because I didn't sign up until the last minute, I essentially am paying $20 for the option to not sign up. So in that case, it's worth it to me.

Number three, make it specific. Don't try to throw in the kitchen sink. My first few workshops was just trying to teach everything. Don't do that. Make it really specific.

Focus it on deliverables and outcomes. Make sure everybody goes away with something really specific. And I noticed as we went along that the more we made that a core value, just the better experience it was for everyone. So that's going to be it for today. Thanks so much for listening.

And congrats to Marie, by the way. Awesome story. Really glad that we could feature it on the show. Everyone, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you want to see the show notes for today's episode, learn more about Marie's work and anything else I mentioned, just come to sidehustleschool.com/852.

852, so much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.